


A Warm Light

by hotrodngold



Series: Turn It Off and Wait Ten Seconds [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Extended Scene, Ficlet, Gen, M/M, Other, Plotty, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-HYDRA Reveal, SHIELD, SHIELD Agent Tony Stark, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 15:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13684740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotrodngold/pseuds/hotrodngold
Summary: “Fury.”Tony pauses, one foot still off the floor in mid-step. This is the third time the Director of SHIELD himself has been waiting for him ominously in a room, although the first time in a few years.The difference this time is, nominally, Tony was expecting him.





	A Warm Light

“Fury.” 

Tony pauses, one foot still off the floor in mid-step. This is the third time the Director of SHIELD himself has been waiting for him ominously in a room, although the first time in a few years.

The difference this time is, nominally, Tony was expecting him.

“Stark.”

He rises, all dark, cascading leather and myopic, sinister looks.

“Is that a new eyepatch? I feel like that’s a new eyepatch. That, or you’ve done something with your hair.”

Fury gives him a look, but Tony knows; he can see there’s a smile pressed between those lips.

Tony takes the extra second Fury’s lack of response gives him.

“... We’re not talking about those helicarrier upgrades like my calendar says we are, are we?”

Fury gives him another look, removes a small—oh, that’s _his_ design!—signal scrambler from his pocket, activates it, and tosses the disk on the table between them.

Tony raises an eyebrow in his own workshop, in his own damn house, and does one better.

“J, Mockingbird Protocol.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Mockingbird,” Fury so-very-obviously does not ask.

“Extrapolated conversation based off pre-recorded sound bites broadcast on enhanced, localized frequencies across the spectrum. An android in this very room wouldn’t be able to tell if the words we were speaking were the right ones, or the ones it’s receivers were telling it were there.” He’s maybe a bit smug.

But Fury raises an appreciative eyebrow, so not too smug. He reaches for the scrambler. Switches it off.

“I need to hire you on as an Agent, Stark, and I need it done fifteen minutes ago.”

Tony blinks. “... I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

“Sign these,” Fury tosses a thick stack of papers where the scrambler had been, notes Tony’s sneer at _hard copy_ and follows it up with, “Sign the CINDA first, Tony.”

So Tony digs out the CINDA, checks if it’s the standard boilerplate, sees that it _isn’t_ , and gets to reading. The longer he reads, the higher his eyebrows go. Several times during his review of the three page document, he glances up at Fury, tries to read him, at all, and goes back to reading when that placid stare gives him nothing.

Ten minutes later, he’s read the whole thing twice, scratched out a line about proprietary technologies and added in his own about reciprocity of SI trade secrets, and signed it.

The first words out of Fury’s mouth are, “How long will your Mockingbird sing?”

Tony shrugs, asks, “Did I do anything interesting in June?”

A long, heavy look. “Goddamnit, Stark.”

The year after that shitshow in New York has not taught Fury more patience, but it _has_ taught Tony a lot more caution.

His smile fades and he turns his attention to the files before him. Several long, tense minutes go by before Tony looks up from the file describing munitions research and weapon development far beyond what he’d cracked and spilled to the Avengers on the helicarrier. Biological testing that twists his stomach, mystic and gene manipulation that went beyond the pale. 

He feels numb.

“Nick...?”

And Fury meets his gaze steadily—and then his eye falls.

“Nicky,” he speaks slow, deliberate. He’s not sure if his brain is working quite right and he sure as hell doesn’t want the awful equation in his brain solving itself the way it’s currently trying to do. “You need to spell this out for me. I’m not...”

Fury—Nick, suddenly, Tony needs another human here, not a government title, not the spy’s spy just another goddamn person—sighs, shifts in his chair. For the first time since Tony’s known him, Nick slouches, sprawls.

It looks undignified, unprofessional, and weary.

“I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things,” he tells Tony’s ceiling. “I couldn’t be certain. Paranoia’s an unfortunate symptom of this job, Tony, and one day, it kills us all.”

Tony swallows, glances back down at the horrors scattered across his coffee table.

“What do you need?”

Nick, suddenly Fury in all his glory once more, sits up and leans forward.

“Proof.”

Tony looks at him.

“Names,” Fury amends. “And to know how far up this goes.”

Tony stares at him, considering. Looks back down. A picture pinned to the front of a small stack showed post-mortem photos of a man’s jaw and upper chest. The skin and muscle of the lower face, neck and shoulders was completely eaten away.

“Why me?”

“You’re unaffiliated, have been from the beginning, you have the training after a fashion, and you’re damn good at getting in places that don’t want you there.” There’s more, Tony knows there is. He looks up.

“Howard was a founding member.”

Tony knows.

“I think he was killed because of it.”

Tony falls back in his chair.

“I think these bastards had already infiltrated SHIELD back at least that far.”

“Well,” Tony runs a hand through his hair. “That. That certainly is new information.”

Tony swallows.

Gets up.

Walks to the mini bar across the room, pours a drink, thinks a second, and mixes another. He downs the first, refills that glass and heads back to Fury.

“My father died in a car accident, Fury, on a cold, icy December night, with a suspiciously absent toxicology report as part of his autopsy,” Tony tells him plainly. He takes another drink, then looks at his whiskey, grimaces, and places it on the table.

Fury rotates the second drink in his hands.

“I pulled the tox report, on former Director Carter’s direct orders.”

Tony stares at him. “Why.”

Fury is silent at him for a long moment, before sighing and taking a drink.

He carefully sets the half-full glass on the table with a click, “Because your father was stone-cold sober that night, and transporting what we hoped would be the first new batch of the Super Soldier Serum.”

Tony knows what shock feels like. It’s an intimate knowledge that's confirmed by the way his jaw and neck tingle, and the way the world goes just so slightly grey.

 _Too much at once_ , he thinks, numb, as his hands go heavy and awkward. 

He manages to lean forward without falling over, far enough to dig down through the pile until he finds the autopsy report he'd ignored the first time around. He almost knows it by heart, but his eyes zero in on the wounds on his father's face, the 'collapsed trachea' listed as Maria's cause of death.

Clears his throat.

“Aunt Peggy had you cover up the fact that my father wasn’t drunk to draw attention away from the fact that he was killed because he was transporting something that the world would try to kill him for.”

Fury’s nodding as the rest of it clicks.

“No, wait,” he back-tracks. “She wanted it covered up because she knew that something was off about the whole situation, because no one would have– _could_ have known that Howard was transporting something like that, not without a mole, because the serum was so far beyond classifi– Shit.” He reaches for his glass, takes another drink. He doesn’t even care that Fury’s eyes stay on his shaking hands, or that they search his face after he’s drained the glass.

“Shit,” he breathes again.

Fury lets him sit in the silence for a long time.

“You’re the only person I’ve told about this, Tony. You and no one else. I was wrong about you once before; I don’t think I’m wrong now.”

He leans in, rests a hand on his shoulder and Tony lets him because he’s in shock, or because the look on Nick’s face is just so desperately _real_ , pleading, that he can’t not.

“I can’t trust my own agency right now, and that galls, Stark. But you’ve never been anything but loyal to your country, and I can’t ever see you being coerced into anything. Get me evidence to _bury_ these fuckers, and I’ll find out who murdered Howard for you. I’ll bring you the person who killed your mother.”

Tony locks eyes with him, and– shit, he’s not a poet, but _something_ passes between them. Understanding, maybe, or more like an agreement of like purposes. Tony’s going to check all this (moles in SHIELD? Of course he is) he can’t _not_ , but the truth or the lie of it makes no difference; Nick Fury on his side is better than against him.

“If it’s true–,”

“It is,” Fury states.

“–then I want him dead. The person who killed them,” Tony says. "I want him buried in the deepest, darkest hole you can find, and I want to be there when he dies."

Fury says nothing, before slowly nodding.

“You’re nothing like your father, Stark,” Fury says, standing. “But you’re very goddamn much like your godmother.”

He shows himself out, while Tony sits and contemplates the hardcopy files in front of him.

“JARVIS, new project. Shard an unused server, something from the eastern european group, and route it through South America, you know the drill. Encryption level: ultraviolet. Throw everything we have to date on SHIELD in there, including the Avengers Initiative stuff from last year, and the fragments about TAHITI we’ve been seeing. Designation...”

He stares at the image of a man missing half his face, raw chemical burns done because of someone’s sadism. An infection left too long to rot.

“Designation: Kassandra.”

**Author's Note:**

> A CIDNA is a Confidential Information Non-Disclosure Agreement. Think 'gag-order.'
> 
> It feels weird posting something this short (barely above 1.4k!) since it's been awhile since I dropped anything below 5k on this site.
> 
> Still, this scene helps establish the tone of Tony and Fury's relationship in the TIO verse. (And to think, all it took for Fury to let Tony into the secret world of spies was a second round of torture and imprisonment....)
> 
> *cough* Anyway. 
> 
> I'm slowly working on the next big installment, but felt this might help explain some elements of that next fic.


End file.
